Catholicism maintains it somehow by having "patron saints" and every city picking one up. Most cities in highly Catholic countries will have their own specific saint that they will have a special relationship with.
And don't miss those that have wider use than one town. Sta Maria del Carmen, patron of mariners, is celebrated in the same day in July in many a coastal town that had a fishing industry. The statue leaves the church and is paraded around in people's shoulders, taken to the port, and often sent on a short trip on one of the boats. The locals prayed for plenty fish, and for the fishermen to avoid dying at sea. You can trace that kind of thing to a polytheistic world quite well.
One difference is that saints are not deities, even if there may be a similar psychological need (for protection, help, etc) in play. Saints do not possess power of their own accord. They function as intercessors. They are still human beings, albeit in an elevated spiritual state or plane, so to speak (a saint is anyone who is saved from hell and in heaven; canonized saints are simply those who are known to be saints and thus formally acknowledged).
Pagan gods are personifications of natural forces, hence Thales's famous remark that "the world is full of gods". They are beings like you and me, in some sense, with powers that we may not possess.
God, on the other hand, is not a personification of a force of nature or one being among many. In that sense, the distinction between monotheism and polytheism can be misleading, because it's not a matter of how many gods you believe in, but a profound difference in understanding of what divinity even means. God here is the Ipsum Esse Subsistens, or self-subsisting Being; the verb "to be". This makes God prior to any particular being and the cause of the be-ing of anything and everything at all times.
Whatever the history of the development of theological ideas and beliefs, these must be distinguished from the philosophical substance of the beliefs.
> Pagan gods are personifications of natural forces, hence Thales's famous remark that "the world is full of gods".
There were all kinds of gods. The Christian conception of God is taken from "pagan" philosophers. There's also a difference between theologian's/philosopher's conception of the Divine and religion and how lay people actually understood their faith. Even early Christians were divided on how they understood God.
If I've learned anything from brief forays into different Gnostic groups it's that at some point in some place humans seem to have believed every possible variation of themes and interpretations.
If you analyze these various conceptions according to their basic metaphysical claims about the nature of the divine, that diversity collapses quickly.
This is why we can say that Jews, Christians, Muslims, etc. worship the same God, for example. Yes, they disagree about God - and these are very important and even profound differences, to be sure, pace the indifferentists - but the basic object of belief can be said to be the same.
OTOH, the basic nature of polytheistic gods is radically different. The pagan gods are fully immanent, because a truly pagan understanding of the divine lacks transcendence. You do not find a true distinction between creator and creation here. Where we do find purported "creator" gods, it is always something like mutation of some primordial chaos and not a genuine creatio ex nihilo. If you cannot draw a distinction between the creating cause and the created effect, then you do not have transcendent divinity. Divinity in such a scheme is just another part of the world.
> If you analyze these various conceptions according to their basic metaphysical claims about the nature of the divine, that diversity collapses quickly.
The word "basic" is doing a lot of lifting in that claim. Borborites believed in and practiced the sexual sacrament. Ophites believed that Christ was the serpent in the garden of Eden. Some Cathars believed that Eve's daughters copulated with Satan's demons and bore giants. These stories have been told for a long time, and some versions are literally opposite to others - with opposite meaning derived. From my perspective, the nature of human cognition, especially over deep time, results in exploring every internally representable version of an idea or in this case a theology.
It seems to me that conceptualization around the divine has evolved radically over time, and can only appear unified from the relatively limited perspective of the individual.
And if you look at all those quintessentially pagan gods of the myths, you will find that they share this in common: that they are beings among many.
> The Christian conception of God is taken from "pagan" philosophers.
I'm not sure what you're implying, but traditional Christian theology draws from both biblical sources and philosophical analysis, and yes, that includes the philosophical works of pre-Christian, pagan philosophers (note the high esteem in which theologians like Augustine and Aquinas hold Plato and Aristotle, for example; Aquinas goes so far as to honor Aristotle with the title of "the Philosopher"). And not just the pagan philosophers: you can also include the work of Islamic philosophers like Avicenna and Averroes, if you like, who made contributions to the existence/essence distinction.
Here, biblical sources most strongly correspond to revealed knowledge, which is to say, knowledge that cannot be inferred through unaided reason (like the Trinitarian nature of God), while the philosophical corresponds to what can be known through unaided reason (which is the proper object of what's called natural theology).
This is completely consistent with Christian, certainly Catholic tradition and the concept of logos spermatikos (a term Justin Martyr borrows from the Stoics; note also the use of "Logos" [λόγος] in John 1:1, which has echoes in such concepts as Tao [道], Ṛta [ऋत], Maʽat [mꜣꜥt], and so on). If God is real and knowable at least partly by unaided reason, then you would expect at least some of that knowledge or some approximation to surface in a variety of cultures. In this respect, the Catholic Church claims to possess the fullness of revealed knowledge.
But the source of a truth is irrelevant.
> There's also a difference between theologian's/philosopher's conception of the Divine and religion and how lay people actually understood their faith.
What's your point? That we should treat the two as on par? Do you do that with any other field other than theology? The sciences spring from culture, but a good science deepens and refines and corrects our knowledge beyond what was given in our. We don't treat doxa and endoxa as having equal weight.
> Even early Christians were divided on how they understood God.
Again, I fail to see your point. People disagree about all sorts of things and fall into error all the time, and in this case, when they are working out things and their logical consequences.
And I wouldn't overstate the plurality here. Even if there were disagreements among early Christians, and even if there are disagreements between Christians and Jews and Muslims, we can still legitimately claim that any genuine monotheism has as its object the very same God apart from those disagreements (which matter, of course, but not in agreeing about the basic object about which disagreement exists). And that is part of what I was claiming easier. If you view divinity through a shallow, polytheistic lens that merely classifies based on the number of gods in the proverbial pantheon, then monotheism ends up being interpreted as merely a special or degenerate case of polytheism. But it isn't, because a robust monotheism doesn't just claim there is only one God, but that there can only be one God.
> note also the use of "Logos" [λόγος] in John 1:1, which has echoes in such concepts as Tao [道]
Well, 道 is used to translate the Biblical Word because (a) it is the native Chinese word for what is right, and also (b) it is, unrelatedly, also a verb meaning "say", but that's just a pun. The 道 of morality is not a word or anything related to a word. It's a path, the correct path through life.
Christianity is a really interesting case here since it is theoretically monotheistic, but the Trinity is basically a way to have 3 separate gods in a monotheistic religion. It's a fascinating bit of theology.
I don't know how it is in Europe but down here in Brazil they're lesser gods in all but name. I see no functional difference between their cults and the ancient pagan cults.
They're not gonna admit it because being monotheistic is kind of the whole point of Christianity. Just like they're gonna admit how the Trinity was just a cop-out to the obvious polytheism in the Bible and the traditions.
